Most places of work have a thing called Summer Fridays, which is when you either get out at about 1PM or don’t come in every other Friday.  Now I’m not going to brag or anything, but, I totally got out early yesterday, and by early, I mean 4PM. 

We weren’t let go early due to the thing called Summer Fridays, no.  We were released early due to this…

gas-leak-in-long-island-city.jpg

See that CAT machine across the street?  Yeah?  Well as it was digging up the sidewalk across the street it managed to completely rip up the gas main - and it wasn’t the worst construction accident of the day in the city.

The emergency public address system came on to let us all know that our building was not in any immediate danger, despite that all of us were already under the assumption of there not being any danger or even had knowledge of a large gas main break.  We immediately flooded to the window and could see the gas escaping into the air by the way that the dirt and sand was blowing up into the air. 

Every couple of minutes the guy would come the P.A. system and say, “This is your building Fire Safety Manager” then there would be a long suspenseful delay in what came out next, and then he would repeat what he said earlier in that our building was safe - for now.

For all of the nearly daily testing that is done of the fire system - sometimes done with the most frantic of voices - despite there being a slight danger of fireball, I was utterly unfazed by the speaker and what the actual situation was for I’ve been numbed to the sounds of emergency in the office due to the constant testing, and I’m not the only one.  Congrats Fire Safety Director!

Now because of this most people in the building were pacing around freaking out thinking that we were all going to die, and because of this AND because of the fact that a half an hour of this went by late in the day on a Friday afternoon AND because it was gorgeous out we were all let out early at 4PM. 

Yeah…so just to let you all know it’s okay to be envious of my work hours…